programming

Swift uses ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) similar to Objective-C to track and manage application memory. In most cases, we don’t need to bother about memory management by ourselves, the swift compiler will take care of it. But there are some cases where we need to deal with it by ourselves. I am going to discuss some of the common cases from those.

We all have been through situations, where we had to create classes with multiple constructors or constructor with a lot of dependencies (parameters). These classes tend to get bloated quickly with the over used constructor methods and too many parameters and starts messing with the default properties values. Whenever you find yourself into this situation you; my friend; have been trapped by a notorious anti-pattern called Telescopic Constructors or, Telescopic Initializers. The initial intention of this pattern was to simplify the process of working with classes with a lot of initializer parameters.

While talking about design patterns, most developers have fumbled upon this one; especially cocoa developers (both iOS and Mac application developers). Singletons are the most common design pattern you’ll come to see in Cocoa and CocoaTouch frameworks. They are literally everywhere; i.e. UIApplication.shared, UIScreen.main, NotificationCenter.default, UserDefaults.standard, FileManager.default, URLSession.shared, SKPaymentQueue.default() and many more. So, what are Singletons? And why are they so special?

In real life software development one particular challenge we developers constantly face is requirement changes. Anyone who is in the software business game knows how frequently and drastically software specification can change in any time. For this reason, in software engineering only one thing is considered as constant: CHANGE!

In object oriented world, we have some nice ways to deal with this, i.e. design patterns to the rescue. There are lots and lots of design patterns out there to help us, the developers. Amongst them the most common and widely used one is known as Strategy Pattern. Any developer with a few years of experience under his/her belt uses this quite frequently (sometimes even without knowing they are using it!).

In this post I am going to try to create a scenario, which we can solve using strategy pattern.

In iOS we always end up defining our instance variables as @property (strong) or @property(weak). But what does strong and weak mean, and when to use which one?

In cocoa, an objects memory is managed via a system called retain count. When an object is initialized, its retain count is increased by 1 from zero. And each time it is strongly referenced by someone, the retain count keeps increasing by 1. In ARC (a compile time feature of Apple’s version of automated memory management, acronym of Automatic Reference Counting), it only frees up memory for objects when there are zero strong references to them, or simply put, the retain count is zero.

We all know the three basic principles of OOP: Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism. And there is also this fourth principle: Data Abstraction; though it’s not always mentioned as a standalone principle, as it is closely tied with encapsulation. Today I am going to discuss a simple case to display the power and necessity of Inheritance.

Let’s assume a scenario: you are working on an application, which has to perform a server call asynchronously and has no direct impact on the UI. But when the server returns a response, you have to make some modification to your application regardless of the present UI.